In Renderings for a Library Landmark, Stacks of Questions

None of New York’s great buildings embody the spirit of the city more than the New York Public Library, the cherished century-old Beaux-Arts landmark in the heart of Midtown Manhattan. But cities change — New York all the time — and even the greatest buildings may need to change with them. So it was that more than four years ago the library announced a $250 million plan (since revised upward to $300 million and still rising). Norman Foster, the celebrity architect, was enlisted to revamp and modernize the 42nd Street building.

The plan gave New Yorkers plenty to fight about: Would it cripple scholarship by hindering access to research materials? Would it offend the dignity of a venerated space by opening it up to Starbucks-slurping teenagers and transitory mobs scouring DVDs? Would it bring the financial efficiencies promised?

But only lately, since Mr. Foster revealed sketches last month, has it been possible to see an actual rendering of the proposal. Having looked at it and spent a few hours speaking with the library’s president, Anthony W. Marx, and with other library officials, and after further discussions with Mr. Foster, I’m not buying it.

Even after all these years, more time is needed to figure this thing out.

The plan entails closing two troubled branches: the dilapidated Mid-Manhattan across the street, which serves 1.5 million visitors a year, and the Science, Industry and Business library, a profligate investment from 20 years ago that remains a cautionary tale.

This time the bright idea involves demolishing the deteriorating seven floors of the structurally integral book stacks in the vault space under the Rose Main Reading Room at 42nd Street, and in its place installing a brand-new circulating library, designed by Mr. Foster: major transplant surgery, with the great building designed by Carrère and Hastings as guinea pig.

Closing these two branches and consolidating operations will save money, library officials insist. Selling the two buildings that house the branch libraries should raise a fortune. The books now in the 42nd Street stacks (a space whose decades-long decline, through various renovation campaigns, suggests to me a kind of demolition by neglect) would be sent to state-of-the-art storage below Bryant Park and in New Jersey.

At the same time, rooms now unused in the 42nd Street building would be thrown open to writers and children. And so the research library would be joined under one roof with a circulating one.

The motivation is money, and there’s no denying that the library needs it. Combined with private donations and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s commitment of $150 million from taxpayers, the plan is supposed to accumulate an endowment that would yield perhaps $7 million to $15 million a year, partly by eliminating the expense of operating the branches. That money would go toward buying more books, rehiring laid-off staff members and other things the public needs. So library officials see it.

The parties in charge are earnest in their conversations. While remaining hard to pin down on the dollar amounts, they are eager to demonstrate that every conceivable alternative strategy has been explored, weighed, re-examined and rejected. Proceeding in any other way than by investing in this potential Alamo of engineering, architecture and finance would be irresponsible, they’ve concluded. I have found this to be a not-uncommon phenomenon among cultural boards, a form of architectural Stockholm syndrome.

There is, in the abstract, something catchy about the Chinese puzzle ingenuity of the plan, about the consolidation and reinvention of the century-old stack space. I can see how the idea caught on.

The problem with it is not, as many prominent writers and scholars have complained, its excessive populism or the inconveniencing of researchers who might have to wait an extra day for books to arrive at 42nd Street from New Jersey. These snobbish-sounding objections have only fueled the library’s public relations offensive, which has advertised the plan as democratizing a building that many New Yorkers find intimidating.

But the library, free and open, is already an exemplar of democracy at its healthiest and best, of society making its finest things available to all. Climbing the library steps, passing the lions, rising up to the reading room where anyone can ask for books, enshrines, architecturally, the pursuit of enlightenment. Inspiring more people to reach those heights is the library’s loftiest mission. Peddling “democracy” as if it were a popularity contest is what “American Idol” does.

The library makes a hollow case about how much square footage of the building is now closed to the public and will be opened. The Metropolitan Museum is 2.4 million square feet; less than one million of that is public space. The American Museum of Natural History is 1.8 million square feet; 700,000 is public.

The value of an institution isn’t measured in public square feet. But its value can be devalued by bad architecture. And here we get to the schematics Mr. Foster finally unveiled last month. They aren’t worthy of him. After more than four years, this hardly seems the best he can do. The designs have all the elegance and distinction of a suburban mall. I was reminded that Mr. Foster is also responsible for the canopied enclosure of the inner court at the British Museum, a pompous waste of public space that inserts a shopping gallery into the heart of a sublime cultural institution.

At the least, the 42nd Street library will require Mr. Foster’s full attention, or the attention of another architect, one with a genius for devising a pleasing and functional place deserving of this building in a vault never intended for the public. Carrère and Hastings devised the stacks with a long wall of narrow, deeply recessed windows slotted between wide piers to keep daylight off the books, not to give library patrons views of the outside. You can see these windows from Bryant Park, below the arched windows of the Rose Reading Room. They look penitentiary.

To make a virtue of their oppressiveness, Mr. Foster has pulled the various floors of the circulating branch back from the wall, creating balconies that officials hail as an architectural boon because visitors will be able to take in the full height of the slot windows. To me, what results is an awkward, cramped, banal pastiche of tiers facing claustrophobia-inducing windows, built around a space-wasting atrium with a curved staircase more suited to a Las Vegas hotel.

Equivalent in size to the Rose Reading Room, but chopped into floors, this former book-stack vault provides about the same amount of public space now in the two branches that the library wants to close. Leaving aside renovations and additional rooms elsewhere in the building (rooms that could be opened now, independent of the rest of the plan), we’re talking about a straight-up trade, in terms of space, that costs $300 million.

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The New York Public Library is planning a new design by the architect Norman Foster.

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And that’s if you believe the budget. Library officials point out that the numbers aren’t official yet. Mr. Marx acknowledged to me that the cost might well rise to $340 or $350 million. But the library won’t permit it to go higher, he vowed. I can’t recall a single major building project at a cultural institution whose original budget hasn’t ballooned, too often catastrophically. Every one of those projects began with a pledge of vigilance. And the more calamitous of them (museums in Milwaukee, Denver, Rome, Amsterdam, Ottawa, the list goes on) involved engineering feats and celebrated architects.

In this case the engineering hurdle is that the book stacks are a forest of 1,300 steel columns that support the Reading Room. Removing those columns now to make way for Mr. Foster’s library will be like“cutting the legs off a table while dinner is being served,” as Joseph Tortorella, the principal in charge of the project at Robert Silman Associates, the engineering firm enlisted by the library, recently put it to The Wall Street Journal.

Today’s engineers have all manner of high-tech tools at their disposal, and Silman is a top-notch outfit. But homeowners know what happens when contractors talk about performing magic tricks. Even if Silman’s pros ensure that the reading room doesn’t collapse, the whole rationale for the plan — the annual millions promised for acquisitions, librarians and so on — comes crashing to earth if the finances don’t work out.

So let’s step back. Put the plan aside for a moment and ask the big question: What do New Yorkers actually want from the library system today? Circumstances have evolved over the last few years. Technology is changing, and so are reading habits and urban demographics. The public thirst for neighborhood branches has become unquenchable. Financial honchos who cough up big bucks to carve their names on 42nd Street for the sake of posterity might recall that Andrew Carnegie made himself immortal by supporting — and building — the small local branches that now more than ever are anchors of their neighborhoods all across the city. They’re the ones that really need the money. The library should make a case for them, vigorously.

Officials make a decent argument for concentrating on a new central circulating library instead. But at a time of flux and before any contracts are signed, the library owes New Yorkers a clear and open accounting of both its plan and some alternatives.

It should make public a detailed cost analysis by at least one independent party — not one of the firms the library has already hired. I gather that Mr. Foster is back at the drawing board, pursuing revisions that might be less expensive and incorporate more of the historical elements of the stacks. We’ll see if they’re any better. Or maybe the library might even wish to open up the project to other architects.

As for those alternatives, the Mid-Manhattan site at present has the potential to be redeveloped as a 20-story building. The library could also sell some 100,000 square feet of unused space at the site, or seek city permission to transfer air rights (there may be more than a million square feet) from 42nd Street. A new Mid-Manhattan branch should cost a fraction of gutting the stacks and could produce much better architecture.

Library officials recapitulate that they’ve run the numbers for redeveloping Mid-Manhattan and that they don’t work: They’d lose much or all of the taxpayer money Mayor Bloomberg has committed, lose the benefits of consolidation and would still have to repair the stacks at 42nd Street.

That said, the last thing they’d want to be remembered for is trashing their landmark building and digging a money pit. They might check out the names of the lions on the front steps, for prudence’s sake.

Patience and fortitude.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: In Renderings for a Library Landmark, Stacks of Questions, Still. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe